On Creativity Archives

volver

a mis notas

A wish. To return. To possibilities
for becoming.

The problem: these accommodations of
familiarity, adapting

To dysfunction & symptoms include:
incessant sighs, bone-weary

Fatigue & fantasies of escape.
Treatment: accommodation.

Of this need to escape,
what’s turned unbearable.

Temporarily, at least.
& then return.

To observe how it got this way
& intend.

To steer differently, soon as enough
rest comes to clear bleary fogs

From weary eyes long trained
toward casting nets

Across these dreary
& abundant bogs

Where the lost remain
preserved & waiting,
still.

compost

in the formless, fertile mess

in becoming
i break apart
into space

for holding
emergent life
not yet

seen & here
i go dark
underground

to breathe
invisible communion
among all breaking

open

You go around putting on the necessary faces at the appropriate times, hiding the other mess in the back spaces of any given place or moment. In conversation you might allude in an offhand manner to the messes waiting in the wings but you know not to break certain taboos. One of these being an admission that you live entirely in the wings, just flying around in the shadows keeping company with the discarded stuff that has always been your kind.

Then you are going about the motions of your seemingly appropriate life and then there is this urgent material flopping over and beyond the edges of every shut closet door, every drawer. One day, during a vigorous cleaning, you decide to collect the stuff. You throw out lots of things, but this stuff is something else, you set it aside. It waits, being regularly looked at, appearing to pose a question about handling.

Yes, you tell it. Yes. I hear you. Maybe it hears you, maybe not. You touch it. It holds the indent of your finger. It holds space, a malleable and formless lump. One moment it is magnificent in its strangeness, luminous in soft light, and another moment it looks like something a dog left on the sidewalk, and you wonder who does this?

One day, you pose a series of related partial questions to the lump. Will you? And pull. Reveal to me? Knead. Something? And you spend time just holding the cool, lumpy mass of it in a hand, warming.

Its formlessness is part of the appeal, and so is its willingness to bend to any form but precisely.

You handle it. Set it down. It now has a spot on the bedside table, beside the lamp, the pile of books, the coffee cup. The cat approaches, sniffs it, turns, sits beside the lump, then moves away.

Will you? You ask the lump. Show me? You mean your whole life but are embarrassed to say this aloud. You are not yet ready to admit to yourself what you are hearing when the lump whispers back.

You are sleeping, dreaming, or otherwise away when it talks. The cat, who listens with more experience and a more advanced sense of time and purpose, gives you a pointed look when you return. You carry on, leaving, prodding, kneading, arranging, and setting it down. Then you sleep.

Here I am, the lump whispers while you dream. Your whole life.

patterns

within given systems

Sometimes it makes more sense to rebuff balance. Now, for example, I prefer to stay inside the unfolding, never-arriving spiral flight around an ever-renewing lost and found where it is brimming with tactile tongues in four dimensions.

But with no room for such admissions in standard parlance, one carries on. Nodding when the next one repeats the inevitable and expected line. Yes, balance. One of many agreements in a given day: pay no attention to the elephant, the peeking tusks, the tongues.

long wave

before wintering

when i knew time like bird & myself
as blading grass but without a word
for the wide green weft of my sun catching
in full sway before i thought to ask what
after sun gone i would make

shard light

fever break

First disorder, then efforts to fold what storms in––shaping once and then and after, each verse arriving at every oncoming attempt to live.

The Beyonds

From here

What to make
of what remains
after the burn?

Bearings

Where assembly is required

Considering any set of assembled would-be actors in each scene, most of them go nameless. If the story is the frame, the names of those in this majority are a secret between the storyteller and those characters outside of it. Or between the storyteller and those too close to be named. The witness withholds so much of what is from the voice of the story. The process of getting anyone or anything born is so fraught there may be some wisdom in being cautious about who and when you name what parts. Which suggests something about wisdom, its necessary incompleteness. Which suggests I have accessed some, though I have not. I am just trying to write this thing.

Spiral

Regarding the next breath

The artist did a series of spirals. I don’t know what she was thinking before she went down this road but begin somewhere is a familiar feeling. I am often haunted by this one. Anywhere will do, but where is still a pertinent question. You can start at the outside and dive in, in, in––follow the logic to the question of black holes and the possibility of the singularity and related questions about the connecting thread between dimensions, or universes, if you take as a fact the possibility of many in one. Or you could start at the center and spin yourself away, beyond the frame.

***

Inspired by the spirals of Louise Bourgeois.

Seaworthy

Sight fishing lessons

The first thing to learn was forgetting well enough to dream a boat to help with crossing the night, its busy port thick with interdimensional commerce. The next was how to watch the anchor, watch the ropes, keep a pen and a lighthouse nearby to allow for return and remembrance.